Step-Sister Substitution

The lunch goes almost suspiciously well. Marcus refills your glass before you notice it's empty, laughs in the right places at your mum's stories, and even your guarded, arms-crossed-by-default mother has gone soft and bright in a way you haven't seen since you were small. His daughter Selene sits across from you, polite, precise, and looking at you the whole time like she's checking sums in her head.

You say your goodbyes under the awning of the restaurant, and Selene falls into step with you — she's heading into London too, she says, though she never says from where. The walk to the station is quiet, hedge-lined, the afternoon going amber. Then, where the path narrows between two old brick walls, she stops and turns to face you.

'I don't want a brother,' she says, calm as a weather report. 'I wanted a sister.' You open your mouth to argue — and the world lurches. Something in you folds like a page being turned, a pressure behind the ribs, a wrongness that rights itself into a different wrongness. When the dizziness clears, your sleeves are too long, your centre of gravity has moved, and when you catch your reflection in a garden gate's brass fittings, a girl's face stares back, pale and stunned. Selene just nods, once, as if confirming a calculation. 'Good,' she says. 'Now we can talk properly.'